Woodworking shops normally are equipped with many tools such as tablesaws, routers, shapers, planers, bandsaws, scrollsaws, drills, sanders and many others. Many of the aforementioned tools are table based—meaning they are rather large and heavy and generally serve a single function.
In addition to table based tools, there are uses for hand tools such as jigsaws, circular saws, routers and other powered hand tools. Often, each tool has a very specific use and many cannot serve multiple purposes.
For example, circular saws, table saws and chop/miter saws all generally have the same blade (or style of blade), but each is for different functions. For example, circular saws are portable and often used for cross cuts (across the grain of the wood) where portability is important. Table saws are normally used for rip cuts (along the grain of the wood) as well as cross cuts. Miter/chop saws are normally used for angled cuts such as crown molding and others. However, in order to perform all of these cuts, it may be necessary to have three separate tools. Further, since the table saw in a woodworking shop is generally not portable, many will also purchase a contractors saw for off-site jobs. A contractors saw is more or less the same as a table saw, but packaged in a smaller size that can be moved to job sites more easily.
Although portable table saws may add some portability, in order to perform all of the desired cuts one may want to do at a job location with the generally circular blades, it may still be necessary to bring three tools—the portable table saw, the circular saw (hand held) and the miter/chop saw.
The result is a large number of tools that each come with their own expense and the requirement to bring these tools to the job site.
Similarly, other portable tools such as routers and router tables generally have similar bits, but the router is hand held and the router table has rotating bit coming out of the table surface and various fences. Shapers are similar in function, but like the table saw, are much larger table based tools not designed to be portable. One solution to provide for both hand held and table based use of router bits is to purchase a hand held router and a specific table to receive said router. But, the table provides yet another piece of equipment on top of the aforementioned tools and this table generally only has one use.
Therefore, it is desirable to reduce the number of tools used while increasing the overall functionality of this reduced number of tools.